A slow, ragged breath scraped out of my throat. The ice fused to my right knuckles had stopped burning ten minutes ago; now it was just a dull, crushing ache sinking straight into the bone. I peeled my shoulder off the cold stone wall, forcing my legs to accept the concept of bearing weight again.
My internal engine was actively redlining. Ten seconds of [OVERWRITE] had pushed my newly evolved E-Rank circuit into a catastrophic thermal overload. The only reason my ribs hadn't melted yet was standing exactly two feet away from me.
The heavy, toxic outward pressure emanating from Syevira's Shard Parasite crashed against my skin. To anyone else, it was a suffocating deadzone. To my INHERITANCE passive, it was a high-powered radiator. Her ambient poison was aggressively suppressing my internal friction, converting my lethal heat into breathable relief.
I genuinely, desperately wanted her to walk next to me for the rest of the afternoon.
Unfortunately, the rest of the world did not share my specific biological glitch.
"Classes are officially concluded," I rasped, my voice sounding like crushed gravel. "I am going to the infirmary before my central nervous system unplugs itself for the night."
Syevira's amber eyes tracked the uneven shift of my weight.
For a fraction of a second, the absolute, statuesque rigidity of her posture cracked. Her right foot shifted forward. Her hand twitched upward—a blind, instinctual reflex to offer her shoulder for support.
Then, the gravity of her reality reasserted itself.
Her hand dropped. The impenetrable wall of aristocratic ice snapped instantly back over her face.
"The medical wing is currently operating at full capacity with injured students," she stated. Her voice dropped straight into its flat, clinical baseline. "If I step into a trauma center, the ambient pressure from my circuit will suffocate every recovering patient in the room. It would be highly counterproductive. We part ways here."
A tragic, structural incompatibility.
My personal life-support machine is a localized extinction event for everyone else.
"Maintain your quarantine," I said, pitching my voice into a hollow void to match hers. "I'll crawl there myself."
"Do not collapse in the hallway," she murmured to the stone floor. "It lacks dignity."
"Dignity requires caloric energy," I rasped. "But I will try to aim for a soft rug."
I shifted my weight, preparing for the agonizing walk, when her voice cut through the cold air one last time.
"08:00 tomorrow in the courtyard," Syevira stated. She didn't look at me, but her amber eyes dropped pointedly to my bleeding, frostbitten right hand. "Do not be late for your back-alley surgery. And wash your hands first. I despise cross-contamination."
I turned and dragged my heavy boots down the empty corridor.
Every step demanded a caloric payment I no longer possessed. The moment I stepped out of her isolation radius, the devastating biomechanical toll crashed back down on my shoulders. My calf muscles screamed from dozens of micro-fissures, torn apart by frame-perfect movements my skeleton was never built to execute. My internal circuit felt like an engine running purely on fumes and spite.
Worse, my lungs burned. Every inhale tasted like wet ash and rusted copper. The toxic ambient Ink in the hallway air felt suffocatingly thick today, scraping against my trachea like sandpaper.
Just standard F-Rank garbage, I told myself, swallowing the metallic taste and forcing another step forward. My pathetic circuit is just struggling to filter the ambient mana. Deal with it. Keep moving.
The infirmary is at the end of the west wing. A bed is waiting. A bed is a horizontal surface where the world demands absolutely nothing from me.
The final stone archway loomed ahead.
Before my frozen hand could even reach the brass handle, the heavy double doors of the Academy Infirmary hissed open. A wave of sterile ozone and sharp antiseptic washed into the stale corridor air.
Someone stepped out.
Arga Orlando.
A pristine, high-grade medical bandage was wrapped tightly around his left forearm, sealing the lethal thermal burn he had taken from Kazrana's fire. His posture was perfectly straight. His breathing was slow and entirely even. He didn't look like a guy who had just dismantled an upper-tier noble in a brutal deathmatch; he looked like a man who had just finished a mild morning jog.
He stopped in the doorway.
I stopped.
The corridor was not empty. A few injured students and medical assistants were navigating the wide stone hallway, but the moment Arga halted, the ambient traffic instinctively parted. Passing upperclassmen gave him a wide, wary berth, their eyes darting from his scorched Haldia uniform to my mud-caked, bleeding figure. They murmured to each other, their expressions a rapid mix of aristocratic disgust and sheer confusion, before hurrying away.
The space between us felt suffocatingly narrow.
His dark brown eyes—carrying the heavy, invisible weight of a veteran Regressor—locked onto me. He scanned my ruined uniform, my frozen, bleeding knuckles, and the very specific, pathetic way I was distributing my weight just to keep my knees from buckling.
My circuit is currently cannibalizing my own muscle tissue just to filter the raw anomaly poison I am breathing. I just want a horizontal surface. Instead, the universe decided to drop the protagonist directly into my path.
Arga's gaze dropped from my face down to my right hand. The frostbite had turned the skin across my knuckles a sickly, bruised violet.
"If you don't thaw that joint soon," Arga said quietly, "you're going to permanently lose mobility in those fingers."
"I'll add it to my itinerary." My voice sounded like crushed gravel.
"The ward is buzzing." He evaluated the torn fabric at my collar and the dried mud on my knees. "They said it took fourteen seconds. Knowing what Tsukuyomi Raiden can do, I expected them to be carrying you in on a stretcher."
I expected a stretcher too! And a priest, if possible. I was standing in front of a natural disaster, and my muscles are currently screaming in fourteen different languages!
I didn't let my face move, anchoring my voice into a hollow, deadpan void.
"I was genuinely hoping for one," I rasped, swallowing the taste of oxidized copper at the back of my throat. "But apparently, surviving a glacier doesn't qualify for premium transport. The customer service in this Academy is garbage."
Arga studied me for three full seconds. The sharp edge in his eyes searched the absolute, deadpan exhaustion on my face. He was looking for a crack—a sign of posturing or fake bravado. He didn't find one. The math didn't seamlessly compute, but my bitterness about having to use my own legs was entirely, tragically genuine.
A slow, quiet breath escaped Arga's lips.
"The rumors in the courtyard," Arga murmured, his voice dropping into that heavy, veteran register. "They're calling you a lunatic. I'm starting to think they understated it."
Right above his head, my Native System flared quietly.
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────
[ ANNOTATION UPDATE — Arga Orlando ]
◈ [RED] [CROWN]
◈ [GREEN] [EYE] ➔ [YELLOW] [EYE]
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────
He thinks I am a cold-blooded sociopath who doesn't even flinch at death. I am not flinching because my nerve endings are fried, you idiot!
I dragged my gaze away from the yellow text.
"Saw your match," I said, pivoting the target before his algorithm could lock on. "You threw your sword away. Pinned House Haldia's vanguard to the floor and lectured her." I held his dark gaze. "A bit much, don't you think?"
Arga didn't flinch. He just watched me.
"She was already off-balance before the timer started," Arga said, his voice completely even. "I asked her what you told her by the weapon racks."
My brain completely stalled.
Wait.
Hold on.
My brain, currently running on the absolute last fumes of cellular energy, forcibly rebooted itself.
You did WHAT?!
You were locked inside a sealed combat dome with a furious, fire-attuned aristocrat who wanted to melt your skull, and the VERY FIRST THING you did was ask her about the muddy background character standing twenty meters away?! Why would you do that?! Are you completely insane?!
"You saw the telegraph," Arga continued, his tone dropping into the low, quiet register of a man confirming a suspicion. "You read a Haldia vanguard stance perfectly and tried to warn her about it."
Did he figure it out? Did he actually deduce that I have meta-knowledge of her attack patterns?
No. That's mathematically impossible.
But how the hell do you even attempt to gaslight a veteran Regressor who has already lived more than one lifetime?!
Deny it. Deflect it. Do not let him see the panic.
The terror battered against the inside of my skull, but my completely depleted nervous system refused to translate it to my face. I didn't let a single muscle twitch. I just stood there.
"I pointed out a structural flaw," I said flatly. "She didn't appreciate the feedback."
"The shift in her left shoulder," Arga stated.
A trap. He is testing my data to see if I actually know what I'm talking about.
I didn't blink. I didn't confirm or deny it.
Arga let out a slow breath, interpreting my dead-eyed silence exactly as he needed to. He rubbed the back of his neck, the quiet composure in his eyes settling into something overwhelmingly heavy and tired.
"I saw it too," he murmured, looking past me down the corridor, entirely ignoring a pair of second-years who quickly skirted around us. "She fights using her older brother's forms. It doesn't fit her body, and she bleeds through the gaps. If I don't snap her out of it in a sparring dome, someone else is going to do it for real."
He closed his eyes for a fraction of a second.
"It's better I do it now," he added softly. "She'll get over it. Someday she'll probably thank me."
She is absolutely not going to thank you!
She is going to bottle up every single ounce of that public humiliation, ferment it into pure, concentrated malice, and aim it directly at the guy whose name you dropped right before you broke her ribs! You just handed her my face as the anchor for her villain origin story!
You absolute, apathy-soaked disaster of a protagonist. I am going to die because you don't know how to keep your mouth shut.
I didn't let my face move.
"Right," I rasped. "Super inspiring. I'm sure she's drafting the thank-you card from her hospital bed right now."
Arga looked back at me, a faint, tired confusion breaking through his stoic mask at the sheer, dripping sarcasm in my tone.
Ugh.
I need to leave. Right now. Before he decides to forcefully integrate me into another one of his protagonist subplots.
I didn't wait for him to figure it out. I stepped around him.
"Excuse me," I said, dragging my heavy boots toward the double doors. "I need to go bleed in a medically sanctioned environment."
Arga blinked.
The heavy, veteran composure in his eyes stalled for a fraction of a second as the sheer, bureaucratic absurdity of my complaint registered. He looked down at my violet, frostbitten knuckles, then back up at my deadpan face, suddenly realizing he had just been holding a profoundly injured student hostage in front of the trauma center to talk about his own problems.
"Right," Arga muttered. He took a step back, clearing the doorway. "Sorry."
I didn't answer. I pushed the heavy oak doors open. The sharp, overwhelming sting of medical alcohol and Odic antiseptic hit my lungs, and I stepped across the threshold into the infirmary, completely unaware of the sheer existential panic waiting for me inside.